Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Political Thought Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom will hold its annual conference on Saturday 24th November 2012 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The conference will be sponsored by the LSE Centre for the Study of Human Rights. The theme for this year shall be as follows:

HUMAN RIGHTS THOUGHT AND PRACTICE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

The experiences of the Second World War and the Holocaust led to the unanimous adoption of the ‘Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ (UDHR) by the UN General Assembly in 1948. Human rights principles had long formed part of modern constitutions all over the world, but the UDHR was the first international instrument to make a wide range of civil and political rights, as well as a number of social, economic and cultural rights part and parcel of the contemporary notion of democracy.

The field of Transitional Justice – the interdisciplinary study of how countries emerge from civil strife and mass atrocity – has grown exponentially in recent years.

From the painful tradeoffs between peace and justice involved in the work of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the surprising success of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia; from Rwanda’s innovative, controversial experiment in traditional criminal justice to the recent prominent indictments made by the International Criminal Court in the Hague – the field offers one of the most fascinating and politically important opportunities for scholars and practitioners to combine their insights and shape international norms of conduct. Nevertheless, actual transitional justice practices often fail to take a broad, systemic approach to political repair. For instance, while retributive justice measures play a crucial role in addressing past human rights abuses, when these measures are not supplemented by further initiatives reconstructing the social texture, their efficacy in promoting a transition to civil society remains questionable. Indeed, the study of transitional justice itself suffers from a similar shortcoming and remains significantly under-theorized. Few attempts have been made to explore the theoretical questions and conceptual problems that cut across the different disciplinary inquiries.

How should a liberal democracy respond to hate groups and others that oppose the ideal of free and equal citizenship? The democratic state faces the hard choice of either protecting the rights of hate groups and allowing their views to spread, or banning their views and violating citizens’ rights to freedoms of expression, association, and religion. Avoiding the familiar yet problematic responses to these issues, political theorist Corey Brettschneider proposes a new approach called value democracy. The theory of value democracy argues that the state should protect the right to express illiberal beliefs, but the state should also engage in democratic persuasion when it speaks through its various expressive capacities: publicly criticizing, and giving reasons to reject, hate-based or other discriminatory viewpoints.

I wanted to let everyone know that my friend Nicole Hassoun’s book Globalization and Global Justice: Shrinking Distance, Expanding Obligations recently came out with Cambridge University Press and it should certainly be of interest to many readers of this blog. Here is the summary from the CUP webpage:

The face of the world is changing. The past century has seen the incredible growth of international institutions. How does the fact that the world is becoming more interconnected change institutions’ duties to people beyond borders? Does globalization alone engender any ethical obligations? In Globalization and Global Justice, Nicole Hassoun addresses these questions and advances a new argument for the conclusion that there are significant obligations to the global poor. First, she argues that there are many coercive international institutions and that these institutions must provide the means for their subjects to avoid severe poverty. Hassoun then considers the case for aid and trade, and concludes with a new proposal for fair trade in pharmaceutical and biotechnology. Globalization and Global Justice will appeal to readers in philosophy, politics, economics and public policy.

The Department of Government (FAS) at Harvard University will host its annual conference for graduate students in political theory and political philosophy on October 26–27, 2012. Papers on any theme or topic within political theory — from the history of political thought to contemporary normative and conceptual theory — will be considered. Between seven and twelve papers will be accepted.

Submissions are due via email in PDF form by August 15, 2012. Papers will be refereed by current Harvard graduate students, and acceptance notices will be sent by early September. Please limit each submission to 7500 words (about 20 double-spaced pages). Each submission should include two PDF files: one with the paper formatted for blind review (free of personal and institutional information), and the other including a cover page with the title of the paper, an abstract (250 words max.), and your name, email address, and institutional affiliation.